This issue is intended to promote and disseminate recent advances in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI in the USA, IPO in Spain). In particular, we will focus on the problems facing the internet of the future or the internet of things, and the challenges present in this field involving interacting and communicating with the user.
Among the academic disciplines interested in the area of human-computer interaction we find not only the technical disciplines, but education, sociology, audiovisual communication, fine arts, cognitive psychology, and many others.
Human-computer interaction is present in any software and technical device, and interface design has become a critical aspect in their development, as it is one of the main factors influencing the success and competitiveness of software applications. We could say that an interactive system is judged not only by its ability to carry out operations, but also by its ability to properly convey them to the user. The interface is part of a cultural, physical and social setting, factors that must thus be taken into consideration when designing it.
The evolution of interfaces and methods of interaction (Preece, 1994) has given rise to different interactive paradigms over the course of the history of computing, the best-known being the tabletop computer, virtual reality, augmented reality and ubiquitous computing. Technological advances brought a new generation of interactive
computing environments, such as multimedia and virtual reality. The effect of taking the interaction “beyond the desktop” led to new questions and challenges and required considering new phenomena and questions.
History shows us that the predominant interfaces in the 1980s were based on commands and graphics (WIMP/GUI). In the 90s, interfaces evolved to reveal multimedia, virtual reality and hypertext on the internet.
The boom in web environments gave birth to the discipline of information architecture, which relies on the solid classical principles of traditional information science to structure, organize and label the elements that comprise the information environments, thus facilitating the location and recovery of information, which in turn improves the users’ ability to use it and benefit from it.
In the year 2000, interfaces became mobile, and with it cooperative, collaborative and social, tangible and tactile, gestural (multimodal), augmented, hybrid and controlled by the brain (brain computing). Computers nowadays are designed to be “embedded” in an environment. This thus requires rethinking the Human-Computer Interaction in this context. New user interfaces as well as new interaction paradigms have created new ways of communicating and interacting with the user and present new challenges to researchers and designers of interactive systems in terms of improving the user experience and system communicability. As a result, this special issue aims to bring together research work, relevant experiences and rigorous contributions in the area of human-computer interaction.

We invite submissions for this Special Issue that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• How should digital products, services and contents be designed to make them accessible and useful to everyone?
• How to design “good” experiences in people who are constantly interacting with machines in a hyperconnected and ubiquitous digital world?
• How to design interactive systems and experiences in smart cities?
• What elements, factors and components are essential to the design of interactive interfaces?
• What are the key methods, techniques and tools of the new interaction and interface design paradigms?
• What cognitive, physical, ergonomic and cultural factors influence the design of current interactive systems?
• What advances have been made in creating systems that promote a natural interaction between people and machines?
• What innovative initiatives exist for creating and using interactive systems and devices?
• How can communicability between people and machines be improved?
• How does gender influence in the creation of technology?
• How should the quality of a user’s experience with an interactive system be evaluated?
• How should “good” emotional interfaces be designed?
• What are the best ways to organize, represent and display information on an “infoxicated” network so that people can more easily find it and understand it?
• How do new interactive paradigms and systems affect the education, health, art, leisure, work and everyday life of people?